Cloud is disrupting security and compliance. Application hosting environments used to be “islands unto themselves”, isolated from one another on dedicated hardware.

You could keep highly sensitive applications (like a finance app) cleanly segregated from riskier applications (like a customer portal, perhaps in a network DMZ). High-risk computing, like bleeding-edge R&D, was usually buried in a physically separated lab / research environment. Because the infrastructure environments were tied to specific apps, you could build application-specific security around each application.

The concept is simple, of course. For two decades we have built security around this isolated infrastructure model, which gave rise to the network-deployed, perimeter-oriented security solutions we’ve come to rely on.

In today’s cloud world, you create new risks by co-mingling sensitive applications and data with who-knows-what. In a public cloud-hosting environment, you don’t even know with whom you are sharing the environment.

So the new reality of infrastructure is going to have multiple environments, some public and some private. That means security and compliance has to take into account infrastructure that’s more distributed, dynamic and diverse than ever before.

We will help you implement the most cost-effective security features based on your enterprise’s risk profile. We will align the need for collaboration and efficiency with compliance and privacy requirements for your data, processes and systems with a dash of common sense and well-being.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

We called CMI, a trusted IBM technology partner, to help build an architecture that would harness our business information flow and provide us with that competitive edge.Don C., – Sr Manager IT Infrastructure National Beverage Retailer